Comments & Views (Exerps from email)

Manuel Mora, Associate Professor, Autonomous University of Aguascalientes

It is important suggest the following cores idea about it:

a) Present IS/IT are too complex, so a holistic approach (not only based on Software Engineering) it is useful.

b) Process shoud be linked to IT Services concepts (see ITIL, ITSM, etc)

c) Systems Engineering discipline will be the new reference discipline for IS/IT (next 10 years).

Simha R. Magal, Manageing editor of AISWorld

My response is at two levels - macro (college curriculum) and micro (specific course).
At the macro level, we have been working on using the "process" approach in our curriculum, instead of the "silo" approach. Here is what I mean. Traditionally, business school curriculum has followed the functional or silo approach. We have departments / courses organized by functional areas and students go through them with (seemingly) little in common between the courses. Over the last few years we have made a concerted effort to "integrate" the curriculum so that what is taught in one course has some tangible connection in other courses. We are attempting this by using a detailed, realistic case about a manufacturing company that is used in multiple courses. In addition, we have implemented the company in SAP (under their University Alliances program). As students go from one course to another, they complete mini-cases, exercises, problems, etc based on this company. Some courses (e.g, MIS, operations, accounting) use SAP, others (e.g, strategy) don't. We introduce the students to this company in the intro MIS course, focusing on the key business processes, and the data and information associated with these processes. As they go through the other courses, they dissect these processes from that course's perspective (e.g, dig deeper into the production or accounting of the process).

At the micro (course) level: the intro to MIS course. We introduce the company and the procurement process and the fulfillment (sales) process (no production). This consists of three parts (with corresponding exercises). Part I is manual. We document the process via process flowcharts, identify key business documents such as PO, packing lists, invoices, etc., and identify the key data and how they flow through the process. Students then complete an exercise that parallels the above, where they create process flowcharts, complete key documents, identify key data for our company. Part II is create a database. Here students take the documents and data from Part I and create a simple MS Access database and modify the data (manually, as if they were the informaiton system) as the process unfolds and then generate some reports. Part III uses SAP. Here students will complete the same processes (purchasing and
selling) for our company using the SAP system. We can now add complexities that are not feasible in a manual exercises.

Other courses that use SAP follow a similar path, but only Part I and II - complete exercises manually (production planning, MRP, etc.) and then do them (with more complex variations) in SAP.

I don't know if this is what you are looking for. If it is, I will be glad to provide more details.

Also at the micro level, we have a course on business process re-engineering. I will ask the person teaching that course to send you some information.

Steve Alter, Professor of Information Systems, University of San Franciso

1. This is about an MBA core course, not an elective in BPM, but still may be relevant. ...  Several years ago the University of San Francisco Business School established a course called "Systems in Organizations" when USF went from a 3-unit curriculum to a 4-unit curriculum without expanding to the total number of units in a degree.  (To me, a single 4-unit course seemed far more interesting than two separate 2-unit courses in IS and in ops management, especially since those two courses would have inevitable overlaps.

The basic idea of the course is stems from the substantial overlap between the core issues in an introductory IS course and the core issues in an operations management course that actually is about operations management rather than assorted mathematical methods.  The core of the overlap is in business processes, ERP, SCM, CRM, quality, project management, etc.  The course was designed to be teachable from an IS perspective, ops management perspective, or combined perspective, depending on what the instructor prefers and is familiar with.

The catalog description is: "Concepts and methods for analyzing systems in organizations; different types of systems; business process, value chain, and supply chain concepts; lean production and quality management approaches, process improvement and process performance measures; information systems such as ERP; impacts of systems on participants and of participants on systems, strategic significance of systems in organizations; planning concepts and methods; project management; methods for building and maintaining systems; system-related risks, vulnerability, and failure. Instructors may present this course from an information systems or operations management viewpoint."

I would say that we have had mixed success thus far. No existing textbooks are designed for this course, although a large amount of usable conceptual material and case studies are available on the Web.  Thus far, one ops management professor basically taught it as an ops management course, while other professors taught it from a combined perspective (as intended).

2. When I teach Systems in Organizations this Fall I will use a large number of downloads, a brief Six Sigma toolkit book, and a draft of a short, highly focused book I am writing on the Work System Method. (i.e., it is not a full IS textbook)    It is not quite finished and will be distributed to students in several installments this Fall.  It or some part of it may be relevant to your BPM course. I would be glad to send you a PDF when it is complete.

3. I wonder whether you really mean "business process management" or something else.  For example, business process management sounds like a minor variation on typical line management, except possibly focusing on cross-functional processes. On the other hand, some people seem to view BPM as a kind of workflow software that makes it possible to change a process by flipping a switch (i.e., with no change management).

4. It might be interesting to look at notations and reference models such as BPMN (business process modeling notation), the work flow reference model, SCOR (supply chain operations reference model), and MIT's Process Handbook (Malone et al).

Haim Kilov, Chief Consulting Architect, Business Modeling and a member of the Strategic Enterprise Solutions (SES) group at IONA Technologies.

With respect to relationships between business processes and steps, we emphasize relationship semantics as well as generic relationships that are the same independently of what the relationship elements are -- things or processes. In this manner, the students understand and reuse uniform relationship structures with well-defined semantics in various contexts and for various kinds of content.

This approach has been standardized in ISO Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing, ISO General Relationship Model, and OMG's UML Profile for Relationships (the latter is available at http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?formal/2004-02-07

For more information, with a lot of examples, see my book "Business models" (Prentice-Hall, 2002).

We taught these concepts in the Data and Knowledge Management course in the MSIS program at Stevens, and the students liked it: the semantics is clearly defined (no need to rely on tacit assumptions or handwaving), and it can be easily explained both to business and to IT stakeholders.